Biodegradability study of the biosurfactant contained in a crude extract from corn steep water

Abstract

Over the last few years, the global biosurfactants market has raised due to the increasing

awareness among consumers for the use of biological or bio-based products. Because of its composition, it can be speculated that these are more biocompatible and more biodegradable than their chemical homologous. However, at the moment, there are no studies in the literature about the biodegradability of biosurfactants. In this work, a biosurfactant, obtained from a corn wet-milling industry stream, fermented spontaneously in presence of lactic acid bacteria, was subjected to a biodegradation study, without addition of external microbial biomass, under different conditions of temperature (5-45 ºC) and pH (5-7). The Box-Behnken factorial design allowed predicting the biodegradation percentage between the range of the dependent variables under study, obtaining values between 3 % and 80 %. Furthermore, it was also possible to predict the variation in t1/2 (time to achieve the 50 % of biodegradation) under different conditions.